National GOP turns on Fla. candidate

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Their frustration had been mounting for weeks. But by late January national Republicans had had it with David Jolly, their candidate in Tuesday’s nationally watched Florida congressional special election.

The candidate had just told the state’s top political reporter that he disagreed with an ad the party was airing against his Democratic opponent — a spot paid for with the nearly $500,000 the GOP had already spent on Jolly’s behalf.

Story Continued Below

“Are you f—-ing kidding me?” a senior National Republican Congressional Committee official told a Jolly staffer over the phone, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Would the Jolly campaign prefer that the NRCC stop spending money in the race altogether? the official asked.

Over the past week, a half-dozen Washington Republicans have described Jolly’s campaign against Democrat Alex Sink as a Keystone Cops operation, marked by inept fundraising, top advisers stationed hundreds of miles away from the district in the state capital and the poor optics of a just-divorced, 41-year-old candidate accompanied on the campaign trail by a girlfriend 14 years his junior. The sources would speak only on condition of anonymity.

Publicly, both sides declined to discuss the dispute. In a brief interview here this week, Jolly shrugged off questions about how he’s conducted his campaign. Andrea Bozek, an NRCC spokeswoman said, “We don’t discuss internal conversations we have with campaigns,” but added that “local and national Republicans have been working around the clock to elect David Jolly on Tuesday.”

Heightening the GOP’s anxiety is the national focus on the race — a battle for control of one of the nation’s few true tossup congressional districts, the outcome of which will inevitably be seen as a measure of the political environment heading into the November midterm. Republicans know that if Jolly loses, Democrats will point to the race as evidence that 2014 isn’t the lost cause for them that many have been predicting.

It is rare for party officials to criticize one of their own candidates, even anonymously, days before an election. One explanation may be so they can point to Jolly — as opposed to the national political mood or the ineffectiveness of attacks against Sink over her support for Obamacare — if he loses.

“We’re one team. We’re one team. We share a commitment to winning this seat, because we share the same view of government,” he said. “Look, campaigns always have story lines to them. The important thing we focus on is what our party stands for, what I stand for, and what Alex stands for.”

Aides to Jolly did not respond to several requests for comment on specific criticisms of the campaign.

Despite Jolly’s problems, polls show a close race, with Sink narrowly ahead heading into the election. Sink, the state’s former chief financial officer who narrowly lost the 2010 race for Florida governor, has made her own missteps, most recently drawing criticism for poorly phrased remarks about illegal immigrants. She has appeared uneasy with the national exposure during the race: When NBC anchor Chuck Todd asked to moderate one of the forums, for example, her campaign vetoed it, saying it wanted a more local figure to ask the questions.

Jolly, a longtime aide to Young who left Capitol Hill in 2007 to start a lobbying career, wasn’t the Republican establishment’s first choice. In fact, GOP officials sought out three other prospects, eager to find a candidate with a higher and more appealing profile than they believed Jolly possessed.

After longtime GOP Rep. Bill Young died in October, House Speaker John Boehner called Rick Baker, a popular former mayor of St. Petersburg, and pressed him to run for the vacant seat. The Baker courtship didn’t stop there: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also pushed the former mayor to run, according to two sources. (Bush has since gotten behind Jolly, appearing in TV ads calling him “the best candidate to go to Congress.”)

After mulling it over for a few days, Baker turned them down. By that time, Jolly’s name had emerged as a possible candidate. But national Republicans went after two other possibilities — former Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri — both of whom also declined. That left Jolly to face off against state Rep. Kathleen Peters and one other candidate in the Republican primary.

As soon as the GOP primary began, problems emerged. State Sen. Jack Latvala, a powerful local powerbroker, bypassed Jolly and threw his support to Peters. And in a bizarre twist, Young’s family was divided: The late congressman’s widow, Beverly, backed Jolly while his son, Billy, was behind Peters.

Jolly won the mid-January primary easily. But his campaign entered the general election nearly broke — and, according to multiple sources, lacking a clear plan to catch up to Sink in the cash race. Jolly hadn’t hired a finance director, and some Republicans grumbled that he was reluctant to make fundraising calls.

Republicans grew worried. According to two sources familiar with the matter, NRCC officials pressed the Jolly campaign on whether it had come up with a blueprint to address the fundraising problems and counter the looming Democratic attacks on his lobbying career.